Kuijia: Traffic Rescaling in Software-Defined Data Center WANs

• Main Authors: Che Zhang, Hong Xu, Libin Liu, Zhixiong Niu, Peng Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi-Wiley 2018-01-01
• Series: Security and Communication Networks
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2018/6361901

Network faults like link or switch failures can cause heavy congestion and packet loss. Traffic engineering systems need a lot of time to detect and react to such faults, which results in significant recovery times. Recent work either preinstalls a lot of backup paths in the switches to ensure fast rerouting or proactively prereserves bandwidth to achieve fault resiliency. Our idea agilely reacts to failures in the data plane while eliminating the preinstallation of backup paths. We propose Kuijia, a robust traffic engineering system for data center WANs, which relies on a novel failover mechanism in the data plane called rate rescaling. The victim flows on failed tunnels are rescaled to the remaining tunnels and enter lower priority queues to avoid performance impairment of aboriginal flows. Real system experiments show that Kuijia is effective in handling network faults and significantly outperforms the conventional rescaling method.